Every Servo release strives to be the biggest ever, and today’s continues that trend with significant improvements to three areas of Servo: the main landing page, the campaign reporting section, and perhaps most significantly, the ad building screen.

New Campaign Index page

The Campaign Index page has received a complete overhaul. Campaign start and end dates are now positioned alongside the campaign’s status icon. There is also a new easy-to-read visual that illustrates how far along the campaign has run in terms of its start and end dates.

Additionally, there is now the ability to navigate directly to the various areas within each campaign such as your tags or campaign reports. And if, for example, a campaign does not have any placements, creatives, or ads you can launch directly into the creation process right from the campaign index page. Fewer clicks and page loads means even faster campaign trafficking.

Reporting

When the campaign reports section was launched, the default date range was the past 30 days. Thanks to some behind-the-scenes speed improvements, the default reporting date range is now “campaign to date.” A complete overview of your campaign’s performance from day one is now shown immediately. The reporting date range selector now also includes a shortcut to choose the campaign’s entire date range with a single click. This new default date range applies to both Advertiser and Publisher reporting.

Ad Index

The biggest improvements in Servo’s latest release have been on the advertisement index and building experiences.

Our team noticed that users sometimes had challenges reading and following some of the more complicated (longer) naming schemes used for creatives and placements within their campaigns. In addition to readability, overall browser performance was sometimes an issue, especially as the size of a campaign grew. Campaigns containing thousands of ads would sometimes cause web browsers to behave sluggishly. Fundamental improvements to the entire ad building process had to be made.

The advertisements main screen now contains a tabbed layout. You’ll see a tab for your existing ads, one for placements that have not yet been trafficked and the same for creatives. Now it is immediately clear which objects have or have not been trafficked. Newly uploaded creatives and placements can be located instantly.

The visual layout of each row on the main advertisements screen has also been optimized especially to help traffic larger, complex campaigns more easily. Longer ad names can now be read more clearly and attributes are arranged and grouped in more intuitive ways. Details about each attribute appear just by hovering over them—no need to click and open the single view of the ad.

1×1 Creation

When creating 1×1 impression trackers, Servo now automatically creates your advertisements for you. In the previous version of Servo, each 1x1s ad had to be created manually. That was more cumbersome, especially if you had to make the same change to many 1x1s.

And that leads us to the most significant part of the latest Servo release…

Bulk Editing of Advertisements

One of Servo’s most highly-requested features is finally ready. Editing hundreds or thousands of ads simultaneously in Servo is as simple as using everyone’s favorite spreadsheet format: XLS. On the main Ads page, start by clicking the “Download traffic sheet” button. Within seconds, the complete list of all ads and their settings in your campaign is downloaded in XLS format. Edit the file as needed, then just upload it to Servo.

Attributes that can be bulk edited:

Click-through URLs

Impression tracker URLs

Redirect URLs

Start and end dates (and time)

Rotation and weighting

To maintain data integrity, Servo scans your uploaded traffic sheet for any accidental errors or omissions, and provides user friendly warnings related to changes that may have unforeseen effects.

Bulk editing can only be used to make edits to existing ads; Servo must still be used to define the relationships between placements and creatives.

Ad Building

The ad building process also benefits from increased speed and time saving features. When trafficking a placement or a creative, search speed has been significantly improved. We have also cleaned up the single ad layout design by reducing the vertical space.

Rich Media Click-throughs

Click tracker URLs can now be set for ads that use rich media creatives. As long as the creative development team has implemented the Servo Rich Media API, ad ops teams can now specify the click tracker for rich media creatives, the same way they’ve always been able to for other types of creative.

Servo: The only constant is innovation.

If you have a sneaking suspicion that there’s a talented team of experts constantly conspiring to help make mobile marketing easier, you’re absolutely right! The Medialets team is dedicated to bringing constant innovations to Servo that empower agencies and brands. To learn more about what’s next for mobile ad serving subscribe to our blog feed (RSS), follow @Medialets on Twitter, reach out to your Medialets Account Manager or contact us.

We are excited to announce the next release of Servo, appearing in your web browser first thing tomorrow morning! It includes an all new self-serve reporting interface (beta) as well as a fully integrated knowledge base, and more! Read on for all the details. And as always, just reach out to your Medialets Account Manager if your team has any questions. Read More

What role did mobile ads play during the holiday shopping season, including on Black Friday and Cyber Monday? To find out, we examined our mobile advertising data from November 1 – December 1, 2014, before and during the busiest holiday shopping days of the year. Read More

This infographic summarizes how and when consumers make online purchases through handsets and tablets, based on data from our latest Mobile & Tablet Ad Attribution Benchmark Report. We release these benchmarks to help advertisers and publishers understand how their ads are performing on mobile—and to offer suggestions for getting even better ROI from their future campaigns. Read More

Ads on handsets and tablets are far more effective than even advertisers realize. That’s the core takeaway from our latest report—Mobile & Tablet Ad Attribution Benchmark Report, Q3 2014—which focuses on every advertiser’s favorite topic: Conversions, and more broadly, the issue of attribution in mobile ads. Based on a deep analysis of 240 billion data points delivered to devices between July 1st and September 30th, 2014, our report establishes just how effective mobile and tablet ads really are. The report offers actionable data relevant to publishers, advertisers, and anyone interested in the future of content on mobile (especially in the run-up to the 2014 holiday shopping season).

Below is a summary of the most important takeaways, beginning with more on the very top-line findings: Read More

Pivotal Research Group recently asked Medialets to provide an overview of the mobile advertising industry, noting that we’re a partner with Facebook’s Atlas and (as they put it) “a preferred vendor with five of the world’s largest agency holding companies.” It’s a gratifying affirmation of our progress as a company to be an expert resource for a top research firm like Pivotal, and the report itself is an excellent survey of the space. Here’s some core takeaways: Read More

ADVERTISING WEEK, NEW YORK—September 29, 2014—Medialets today announced it is an advertising technology partner for Atlas, launched today by Facebook at Advertising Week in New York City. Through this partnership, advertisers and publishers using Atlas can tie their campaigns to the Medialets’ Servo™ platform to deliver high-engagement mobile ad units and better manage and fully measure the ROI of their ad spend. Read More

Medialets has leveraged its mobile ad-serving platform to offer a comprehensive and media-neutral analysis of smartphone and tablet advertising performance. The H1-2014 Mobile & Tablet Advertising Benchmarks Report analyzes over 300 billion data points from mobile advertising campaigns that occurred between January 1st – June 30th, 2014 on Medialets’ ad serving platform. The Report provides valuable insights into campaign performance, using data to reveal how consumers engage with various types of mobile ads, on what device types and media environments, and the kinds of ads that are most effective to meet a campaign’s objectives. This is likely the broadest , most comprehensive report of its kind, and spans the vast majority of mobile exchanges, networks, and publishers. Read More

In the mobile advertising world, every inventory source is unique, one must consider a publisher’s ad serving platform, their apps and SDKs, website codebase, the supported ad formats, and methods for measuring impressions. Whatever the specific setup entails, one truth is constant: ad traffickers need flexible and powerful tags that can easily be tailored for any scenario. Read More

Advertisers know they need to reach an ever-expanding mobile audience. According to a 2014 Millward-Brown study, consumers now spend almost twice the time on a mobile device as they do on a desktop computer. But without the ability to genuinely compare the value of a dollar spent in mobile vs. a dollar spent in other media channels, most advertisers have not adopted mobile media at a rate that even comes close to consumers’ embrace of the medium. In no small part due to this, mobile ad revenue still remains small relative to desktop. Read More

Servo’s biggest release to date!

As the mobile advertising landscape continues to grow, so do the size and complexity of mobile campaigns. Recognizing these demands, the Medialets team decided to focus on four areas of Servo development that would best meet the expanding needs of mobile marketers: lightning fast performance for large tables on Servo pages, the introduction of advanced search filters, improvements to the tag management screen, and lastly an all new, programmatically accessible reporting API. Read More

Fortunately for all of us—advertisers, agencies, publishers, and consumers—the mobile advertising world is growing up differently; it benefits from important lessons from the web, and can use existing, accepted standards rather than invent new ones. Read More

The Servo Innovations just keep on coming! Servo’s latest updates provide multiple functionality and usability improvements that not only enhance workflow, but also add support for for VAST video! Learn more and check out the screenshots below. Read More

I have some good news—no Medialets-run servers or mobile apps were ever subject to the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability. All of your data is safe and secure. There is nothing you need to do.

If you haven’t heard about Heartbleed yet, on April 7th, researchers learned about a security flaw in certain versions of OpenSSL, a widely used encryption service. This flaw was dubbed Heartbleed, and it made it possible for attackers to potentially gain sensitive information from a system that used those specific versions of OpenSSL. Read More

ABOUT MEDIALETS

Medialets is the creator of Servo™, the only technology that helps marketers manage and measure the complete ROI of mobile ad campaigns. Servo is also the only buy-side mobile ad server to receive Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for display impressions and clicks.

Partnered with all five of the top five agency holding groups including Publicis, Omnicom, and Interpublic, Medialets’ Servo supports clients like P&G, American Express, Toyota, HBO, and many other global brands.

Founded in 2008 and venture-backed by Foundry Group, DFJ Gotham Ventures, and Greenspring Associates among others, Medialets is headquartered in New York City with offices in London, Chicago, and Los Angeles.